The Midnight Dress (12 page)

As secretary of the Leonora State High Harvest Parade Float Committee, Pearl writes all the meeting minutes in lime-green highlighter. The building of fibreglass fruit is on track for the parade. Mr Tate, who runs the fibreglass business near town, is making the fruit frames free of charge, but the committee will have to paint nearly fifty metres of calico: purple for grapes, yellow for bananas, red for apples.

‘Maybe your dad could help with the painting,’ says Pearl.

Rose imagines it.

‘Sorry, he hasn’t had his community spirit transplant yet,’ she replies.

‘You could ask him anyway,’ says Pearl, never one to give up.

‘Since when do grapes grow here, anyway?’ says Rose.

‘It’s symbolic,’ says Pearl.

‘I wish I could dress up as a piece of fruit for the parade,’ says Rose.

‘Which piece of fruit would you be?’

‘I’d definitely be a black plum,’ says Rose. ‘All blood red inside.’

Vanessa swishes her tail some more.

‘So is it true, Rose?’ Vanessa demands. ‘Are you getting your dress made by Miss Baker?’

Rose hesitates.

‘Yes.’

Vanessa doesn’t say anything. She smiles a little smile as though in pity.

‘What?’ says Rose.

‘Nothing,’ says Vanessa.

Wednesday they make the dress pattern. Edie hauls herself up from the back steps and goes inside. She opens all the louvres and casements, ready for the night.

‘It’s in here, the dress,’ Edie says, tapping her head. ‘And now we’ll get it out.’

Rose sits at the table, watching her.

‘I can see it . . . ’ Edie continues, eyes closed.

It makes Rose chew her nail.

‘. . . the way it will fall, the way the lines will flow.’

It’s a strange evening. For one, there is no rain. The ceiling of clouds has suddenly lifted, leaving a deep blue cathedral sky. Everything seems unsettled. Thousands of flying foxes swarm in a line across the cane fields. There is a gusty wind that silences the frogs. The coming night is fidgety, unsure of what to do with itself; the wind blows against the house, the mango trees drag their branches across the roof, making a noise like a hull hitting shallows. The flames in the hurricane lamps flicker and bend.

‘I’m the best there is,’ says Edie.

Boring, thinks Rose, she’s heard it all before.

‘Unusual weather,’ says Edie, gathering up a pile of old newspapers from a box in the hallway. ‘Might be a late cyclone this year.’

Along the window sills black ants parade in millions. A line of them march up the wall into the ceiling. Rose sees the lampshade has been removed from the lamp and the dark glass beads unpicked; the shade sits on the floor now, a newly plucked thing. The beads rest inside an old jar. Rose holds it up and looks inside.

Edie unfolds the newspapers on the table.

‘I had some pattern paper somewhere,’ she says, ‘and now I can’t find it.’

It’s no wonder, thinks Rose. The house is filled with that much junk it must be almost impossible to find anything. Small collections of useless things are everywhere: a small shoebox filled with spectacles (‘There’s nothing so lonely as left-behind reading glasses,’ Edie says), a pile of electricity bills tied together with creeper vine (‘I lived without electricity from 1965 till 1971, I’d encourage anyone to try it’), a pillowcase filled with blue quandongs (‘You’d be surprised how often they come in handy’). Several flattened pillbox hats in a plastic bag, damask curtains folded half a century ago in a blanket box, wedding dress pearls in a coffee cup, dried yellow flowers in a dusty basket.

‘In fact,’ says Edie, ‘I saw the pattern paper just the other day but I can’t remember where. Anyway, newspaper will work just as well. Help me spread them out.’

Edie separates the pages so they make one continuous piece that covers the table. She hands Rose the Sellotape. Even the newspapers are old. Gough Whitlam is the prime minister on the cover of one. A headline reads,
VIETNAM SLAUGHTER
. Another front page carries a picture of a train hanging off a bridge. Rose looks at it in horror. Leans closer. She tries to see into the windows: there are people inside, she’s sure of it, not yet rescued.

‘Granville,’ says Edie. ‘You might have been too young to remember it.’

The page below Granville is from the
Courier-Mail
, dated 1977, the year Rose’s mother died. Rose puts her hand out toward it but it’s too late, Edie has decided there’s enough paper and moves it away to the pile on the floor.

Edie draws the skirt first, using the measuring tape and a blunt pencil.

‘That’s only half a skirt,’ says Rose.

‘We cut it on the fold,’ says Edie. ‘Four of these will make the panels for the skirt.’

‘Four?’ Now it seems too big. Four of the half-skirts would fit two of Rose.

‘Hang on,’ says Edie, bending down to retrieve the year Rose’s mother died. ‘We’ll need this for sleeves.’

She hands the sewing scissors to Rose. They feel heavy and important in her hands.

‘Don’t look so nervous,’ says Edie.

‘What if I do it wrong?’

‘There’s no shortage of newspapers,’ says Edie.

She steps out of the way so that Rose can cut along the pencil lines.

‘Will I tell you about the house up in the trees?’ she says.

A big gust of wind comes through the back windows then. It lifts up the pattern and drops it again. The mended blue birds rattle on the wall. The mango tree drags its fingernails along the roof.

‘Yes,’ says Rose.

‘My father did not bring home a bride befitting the house or the land. This house was once grand, the parquetry was always gleaming and the coloured glass was talked about up and down the coast. Lillian Baker, freshly widowed, ruled the place until my mother arrived, screeched all day at the black girls. Florence was not the daughter-in-law that Lillian had expected, not a girl with connections, not the daughter of the honourable member for Toowong, not the daughter of another landowner; there was any number of them in Brisbane at the time, she knew it, it was a fact, she had corresponded with their mothers. No, her son had brought home the common daughter of a tailor. A little seamstress. Lillian Baker never forgave Florence for stealing my father’s heart, on Florence she blamed everything, the falling price of cane, the downfall of the house, the cyclones, the outbreak of war.

Florence was badly disoriented by the train trip. She had been so long in that little back room that she was disturbed by all the vast and empty spaces; the moon riding beside her window; the appearance and disappearance of small wild towns, knocked together, barely standing; the rivers, huge and sandy and half-empty.

Her knees nearly clean gave way at the grand entrance to the house, where the floor was inlaid with golden birds. The dark furniture crowded, everywhere mirrors reflected her, and a carpet of flowers danced beneath her feet. Gold thread, acres of it, was stitched into everything. There was a coat stand with a brass lion’s head, even though no one wore coats.

Up north everyone was half-dressed. No one buttoned up their shirts, men didn’t wear jackets, even the towns were half-clothed: canvas where shop front walls should be, no tar on the roads, planks erected over mud puddles. Lillian Baker herself sat in the high-backed lilac-covered chair in the corner of the kitchen in just her petticoat and silk dressing gown, angrily waving a bamboo fan.

No, there was no large wedding. Florence wore a simple dress she’d made herself: ivory silk crepe, hand-tatted lace, but very plain. She wore no veil. It was a tea-gown really, that’s what you would call it if you saw it now.

Lillian Baker never forgave my mother with her brown-spotted face and her calm quiet ways. When she spoke it was to admonish her. What had she arranged for the evening meal? Well, no wonder Jonathan was just skin and bones. How had she got to be twenty-three, yes, twenty-three, and not know the first thing about keeping a house, how to keep it clean, how to keep down the insects, how to keep track of the silver – she should be counting it or having the head girl count it at the least – and knowing which bedrooms should be turned out and on which day, the mattresses beat and the pillows hung out in the sun? Just look at the picture frames, they were dull as ditch water. Florence should be supervising such things but instead she just didn’t seem to notice.

‘You’ve got your head in the clouds,’ said Lillian Baker. ‘And look at your hair, you don’t wear it with so much as a single curl. You look like a girl just out of boarding school.’

Now all Florence knew of the outside world was Enoggera. She had imagined the North might be much the same, only perhaps a little larger. There would be the forest, which Jonathan had described to her in detail: very green and tranquil and she’d be able to look out over fields dotted with cattle. But it was not like this at all. The land he took her to was close. It breathed right up against her skin. The cane was taller than two men and all night long it sighed in susurrations, she couldn’t walk without her feet being swallowed up in mud, everything clung, everything was damp, it rained and rained and when it didn’t rain her hands swelled in the heat. The mountain was not tranquil, it leant and twisted and was wild.

‘And why are you always disappearing, the two of you, like children, when now you have a house and land to run?’ was what Lillian Baker shouted from her lilac-covered chair.

At every opportunity Jonathan took Florence’s hand and guided her across the house yard, across the back paddock, toward the place he called the hill. She tucked up her skirt and followed him.

‘You mustn’t be afraid,’ he said.

He showed her the track that starts in the open scrub right beside the fence, and leads all the way to the gully and the first of the strangler figs. He helped her over the rocks, the roots, down into the gully and back out again by the rock that’s shaped like a boat. There were steps there, not man-made steps, but a series of rocks seemingly placed by the mountain itself. He taught her how to look for the stand of ancient rose gums when the track disappeared. Oh, the skin of those trees. He taught her how she must listen for the falls.

He took a fallen sassafras flower and placed it behind her ear.

The house, it was not really a house, a cabin, a hut you might call it, but still their place among the trees. He had built during the dry, all the while writing to her to describe his progress. The place was cut from one single turpentine, put up roughly, it was true, and in time it turned a greyish colour. He made it the way the settlers had made their first homes: dovetail joints, laying bark against the uprights, leaving spaces for windows. These windows he later fitted with coloured casements from beneath the old house, amber, pink, green, blue. The first roof was made of fern leaves, but later he dragged up iron, one piece at a time. You could say it was a labour of love. It always leant a little.

They lay there together in that hut, Rose. Florence watched the sky above the falls while he unbound her hair. He recited poems, the well-known ones, and some of his own. He shouted at the edge of the gorge, shouted over the roar of the water,
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE,
to make her laugh. Then evening came and they would have to make the climb back down. They would tumble into the kitchen, breathless, glowing, face-to-face with Lillian Baker scowling in her corner and the tea ruined on the table.

‘Fools,’ she said to them one night, when they arrived home in the twilight. ‘You up there traipsing about like gypsies when down here the war has come.’

‘War?’ said Jonathan.

He picked up the newspaper from the table, fire-vine flowers raining from his shirtsleeves, and in less than a month he would be gone.

Rose cuts the pattern as Edie makes it. The old woman marks the paper – certain lines, arrows, a circle, letters, her very own hieroglyphics – across the face of a man walking on the moon, the prime minister Harold Holt lost at sea. When all the pieces are cut, Rose looks at the pile and bites her bottom lip. She has no idea how it will all fit together.

Edie smiles at her, waiting.

‘What?’ says Rose.

‘No law against smiling, is there?’ says Edie. Her hand moves toward the pincushion shaped like an echidna, then stops. ‘I think we’ll call it quits for tonight. Start pinning out next Wednesday.’

‘The parade is the end of May.’

‘We’ve got plenty of time.’

‘But it’s only early . . . ,’ says Rose, motioning to the room, the night, the breeze lifting the pattern paper.

Edie ignores her, starts walking toward the door.

‘So how do you get to that place?’ says Rose from the top of the back stairs.

‘I told you,’ says Edie. ‘You mustn’t have been listening.’

‘No, you didn’t, not really. I mean you told me part but not in detail. Wouldn’t I need a map or something?’

‘I never needed one,’ says Edie.

Sometimes the woman is infuriating. Standing there in her shapeless sundress and green slippers, Rose can hardly believe she has climbed anywhere at all. If truth be told, she probably doesn’t even know how to sew.